Reflections on Failure

As you might have noticed, the Thirty Years War campaign has vanished into the mists. It was getting totally bogged down, and so was I. The Estimable Mrs. P noted the problem and suggested that doing something else would be better. So, as you will also have noticed, I returned to Machiavelli and played through a few more moves, and had a few more wargames. That, too, is in danger of bogging down, so the Greek-style ACW campaign was born.

Anyway, often reflecting on why things did not work out very well is more instructive, although more painful, than thinking about why things did work out. That is certainly true of the TYW campaign: it took a lot of work and putting it away was the right thing to do, but did not make it any less of a cross between disappointment and chagrin. After all, I have been trying to work out how to use the game for decades and was flush with the success of the Machiavelli campaign.

I think there are multiple reasons for the campaign not working out too well. The first was with the rules: they are over-complex, as anyone who has seen the game may well agree. I had tried to simplify them quite a lot, but it turned out that I had not done so sufficiently. Possibly the best wat forward would have been to abandon the rules of the game totally and transpose the Machiavelli system instead, but that might have lost TYW flavour, even though it would have gained simplicity.

Within the rules, the bidding system for states was, um, a little bizarre. Even though I had tried to simplify that too, there seemed little to stop a power bidding on a state of no use to them except to try to stop someone else from buying it up. But then there was not much to stop someone just wandering a rogue army around the board and doing much the same. To be fair, this also happened in Machiavelli. There must be some way of stopping it. I suspect the answer is more detailed national and diplomatic rules, but that would bog things down (unless the system is very compact and elegant).

The other thing that did not really work was the support system. In Machiavelli (the original) you simply count the number of armies and the one with the most wins. In my version, each additional army counts as half or a quarter, and so on. This just about works in Machiavelli, but with more provinces to base armies in at one point I was adding one-eighth of a Spanish army to half a Bavarian and a whole Austrian one. This started to feel a little silly.

I confess also to making my own mistakes. I have banged on here often enough about the importance of sieges in the early modern world, and I totally forgot to include them. I had considered returning to my own 1618-Something rules where you have an army, plus a train (so you can afford artillery etc) and then adding in a siege train. However, I considered that a bit cumbersome for a play-through and, as a consequence, forgot to add sieges in. As these were pretty vital at some stages of the TYW, it was a bit of a significant omission.

Another problem, at least for solo play, was that there are both too many and too few actors. Too many, because you have to consider the situation from each perspective, and everyone can move every turn, and too few because, well, there were a lot of powers active in the war. I moaned before about how odd it was to have the Dutch Republic subservient to the Elector Palatine, and the same was also true about Sweden picking up the Elector Brandenburg and the Palatine recruiting Saxony. Both of these were, in fact, actors within the war in their own right, not just powers to be purchased.

It might work better (if the rules are simplified) as a multi-player game, but some powers, such as Austria and France are always going to have a lot more leverage than others. When I did run something based on the Machiavelli rules using this map (an expanded one, actually) a problem early in the game was that Bavaria was knocked straight out, followed, not that long afterward, by Sweden. The smaller states have little resilience in the game.

The final problem was that parts of the map started to resemble the First World War. Long lines of armies stretched from Bohemia to the Rhine, and then across the Spanish Road to France. Each of these was blocked, more or less, in that every army had one or two supporting it. This meant that I was unwilling to risk an attack at equal strength, and I could not build up the strength to get an edge for anyone. This is a function of stacking, of course. I could have tried stacking armies in the same province, but then you get into God being on the side of the big battalions, which is not the TYW. Perhaps permission to stack two armies, but the province being put into famine as a consequence might work.

As I said, there is a lot to ponder in a failure like this, rather more than there is in a success. I dare say the TYW is something that I will come back to on another occasion. My current thinking is based around the Cleves – Julich succession crisis of (I think) 1610, which could have launched a European war had Henri IV of France not been assassinated. A nice, limited campaign as a taster for the full works might be an idea. On the other hand, I do like to include all possible powers, and in Europe of the C17 that means Turks, Poles, and Russians should be considered.

Now my incipient megalomania is starting to show, and so I will stop here. But there is lots to ponder.